Tuesday Morning News

When Apple Music launches at the end of June, you’ll be able to sign up for a three-month trial period. After that, you’ll be paying a $10 monthly subscription for the privilege of having most of the iTunes library at your fingertips. According to Re/code, Apple will be passing on $7 of that to the music labels, publishers, and artists. Australian pricing for Apple Music has not yet been announced, but even outside of the US, Apple will be passing on an average to the music industry.

Code discovered in the iOS 9 beta reveals the keyboard scaling to a larger size. It’s a decent enough hint that we’ll be seeing a larger-screened iPad sooner rather than later, with the keys that re-arrange themselves into a different layout depending on the current keyboard size. With the improvements to the software keyboard in iOS 9, I’m wondering if this is Apple’s answer to very good hardware keyboards from competitors and even third-party accessory manufacturers.

Apple has taken the wraps off an upcoming GarageBand update. Synths are the name of the game, and AppleInsider throws out speculation that this forthcoming GarageBand update may be the fruits of Apple’s Camel Audio acquisition earlier this year, noting that the transform pad feature found in the new GarageBand functions identically to the remix pad found in one of the apps acquired by Apple in February.

Apple has launched a colourful new range of PowerBeats2 wireless headphones, and with the colour scheme matching the Apple Watch sport bands, it’s not hard to say Apple wanted people to be able to colour-coordinate their accessories. Otherwise, I guess they’ll also appeal to people sick of seeing those white earbuds everywhere.

A preview of OS X El Capitan from Ars Technica takes us through the latest desktop OS from Apple. Apple’s San Fransciso typeface will probably be the first thing you notice that’s new, although there are plenty of minor interface and feature changes if you look a little deeper. Improvements to productivity features such as Mission Control and the new Split View are also welcome changes.

Facebook’s latest app is Moments, which is kind of like the 21st century’s answer to exchanging photos between you and your friends. It’s photo sharing, but not in the same way that you might share on Instagram or Twitter, as this is mostly between friends. Like many recent Facebook apps, it also looks as though it isn’t available in Australia just yet.

MacStories tells us all Editorial’s latest update, undoubtedly the most powerful text editor for iOS. The app has been updated for the iPhone 6, but also adds a heap of templating features to make it the ultimate writing tool for any mobile Markdown writer.

Yesterday Bethesda announced Fallout Shelter, the first Fallout game of its kind to land on mobile. Launching on iOS first and Android later, Fallout Shelter puts you in charge of your very own vault. Touch Arcade has the preview.

Interestingly enough, Anandtech reports Nvidia has acquired the game porting group and technology from Transgaming, what used to be a fairly well-known Mac game porting house. It’s pretty likely they’ll be using it for other purposes than porting games to the Mac, but the fact that gaming porting is such a priority for a company like Nvidia is eye opening, to say the least.

The Mac Observer writes that Apple’s lack of nostalgia is its super power. Apple has replaced the iPod link in its main site navigation with a link to Apple Music, and while that may be the logical choice, Apple’s recent moves show that it isn’t a company afraid of pushing the envelope.